May 07 2011

… and the funny part was …

I like to see businesses advertising that they are going to do a promotional trip with an Airstream. Why wouldn’t I? It means that I’ve got another article to commission for a future issue of Airstream Life. That’s my bread and butter.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see in the pages of our local “community living” magazine that the Tucson restaurant called KingFisher is advertising some sort of “Road Trip 2011,” and in the ad appears a little Airstream being towed by a vintage pickup truck.

I wonder what that means? I could not find details about this promotion on their website, but it sounds intriguing. It would be great if the road trip actually included an Airstream. All too often the graphic design folks snag a bit of clip-art featuring an Airstream when the planned promotion involves no trailer or all or (far worse) some sort of “white box” trailer instead. I’ll try to find out.

But if they are towing an Airstream, they’ll need to carefully review their towing setup. The trailer in the picture has a significant problem — can you spot what it is? (Click on the image for a better view.)

Yes, it’s being towed backwards. The first tip-off is that the entry door is on the wrong side of the trailer. Look more closely and you can see that the little lip on the left end is actually the bumper, not the hitch.

Now that I think of it, perhaps it’s a better idea that they not take an Airstream …

May 04 2011

What my stomach knows

It might have been the odd dinner we had last night that had me up this morning at 4 a.m., pacing the house in the predawn darkness. Eleanor was inspired by a few items she found at the grocery, and she was having a green vegetable panic, so dinner was a very delicious stir-fry with side dishes of roasted green beans, seaweed salad, and edamame, with spears of pineapple and leftover birthday cake for dessert. A strange combination, but all things we love and so we all ate too much of it and went to bed feeling like we might have made a big mistake.

Certainly that’s how it felt at 4 a.m., when I reached the climax of a strange dream (I was being arrested at a checkpoint for a crime I did not commit, and telling the cops in the interrogation room, “If you hadn’t let the media get into a frenzy about capturing me, and you had simply called me, I would have come in to talk to you without all this drama,”) — and I awoke rather suddenly with a belly that felt full of clay. I had the distinct message from my gastrointestinal tract that something wicked this way comes, and that I would be in for a very long and unpleasant day. This is how I came to find myself pacing the house in the dark and making that prayer common to death-row inmates and those who have been food-poisoned, to be struck down cleanly and not made to suffer too long.

But in fact it was only a minor episode and within a few minutes I was able to get back in bed — just before the eastern sunrise would begin to flood our bedroom, at this time of year — and begin a completely different and yet equally bizarre dream. So perhaps the cause of my unease is not the combination of Japanes and Hawaiian cuisine followed by extensive butter-cream frosting, but rather that I’ve finally gotten what I have been wishing for: lots of complications to upset my otherwise very mundane suburban life.

You see, this winter in Tucson was a sort of experiment. I have mentioned recently that this is the longest stay we’ve had anywhere since early 2003. We came back to Arizona last October planning to mostly stay put and taste the unfamiliar flavor of suburban life for at least five months. I thought this would be an interesting novelty, but in fact there’s only so much of the routine that I can stand, and even with the diversions available in a city this size, life outside the Airstream has become extraordinarily dull.

I confessed this to Eleanor last week — not that it was a huge revelation for her — and she added the fact that Emma has also been wishing to get back on the road, and jealous of the two trips I’ve taken without her (Palm Springs, and my recent Texas adventure). Eleanor can operate under almost any circumstances, so she is not as cabin-fevered as the rest of us, but certainly would like to see more, do more, live more as the old Airstream slogan goes.

The complications I allude to are several. First, our plans are set for summer with a ridiculously complex program of flying and driving back-and-forth across the country, with stops all over the place and ambitious destinations in mind. We will be everywhere, starting with our departure from Arizona about May 19, through our return sometime in September or October. No simple linear plan for us — we have planned zig-zag destinations in something like 14 states and two or three countries. It will be planes, trains, and automobiles all summer, or more accurately in our case, Airstreams, tents, houses and hotels. Sometimes all three of us will be together, sometimes just Eleanor and I, and for a large part of the summer we will find ourselves in different places & operating independently. It all seemed to make sense when we planned it.

The second complication is that I have been looking for an interesting project to focus on while I’m alone, and I’ve found several. Each could easily consume the entire summer, so logically I should have picked just one. But somehow I’ve managed to obligate myself to two highly demanding tasks, with little chance of escape or parole, plus the aforementioned ambitious travel plan, plus numerous smaller projects. And I haven’t yet found enough editorial staff to completely relieve me of the Airstream Life magazine Editor’s job, so I still have that little task to complete as well.

Ah, but it’s all good, as my friend Adam will say. I’m no longer bored with suburban life. Now I’m slightly terrorized by the prospect of going out in the Airstream for a month and trying to get all things done on a slowish cellular Internet connection while driving 2,000 miles to Alumapalooza, and then to Toronto, and then Vermont for a week, and then all the way back to Texas where I’ll pick up the Caravel, and proceed back to home base — and then to California.

Later in the summer, I’ll have to do the round trip to Vermont again. I have no one to blame for this craziness but myself. It’s my curse; I’d rather be dashing madly across the country than idling. At least, as I go I will have the chance to look up dear friends all over the country, all of whom inspire me. And when the idling moments happen, I will relish them. They will be few and precious. That’s the way I like them.

This is possibly the key to why we did so well in three years of full-time travel. It’s much nicer to appreciate the time off when you’ve been busy and stimulated by changing scenery. This summer is another experiment in the making, to see if we can find the magic formula of work and play that makes it all balance in our minds … and in my stomach.

Apr 27 2011

Writer’s Block

The most cruel thing that can happen to a writer is total Writer’s Block. It is, for a writer, worse than having one’s hands chopped off. Even with no hands, one can always dictate words to a person or a computer, but the dreaded Block steals the very core of the process.

Fresh ideas from the “little gray cells,” as Hercules Poirot would say, are our stock in trade. What overlays the ideas is merely clever storytelling and ornamentation. In other words, most of us who claim to be writers (and yes, I’m including myself) are essentially windbags just talented enough to expound on any germ of an idea until it becomes apparently richer or more entertaining, and thus “worth reading.” Steal our inspiration, dampen our creative wool, burn our stockpile of ideas tucked away for future use, and suddenly we are left with nothing to expound upon. We become, in our own minds, blasé. It’s a horrifying prospect for us egotists.

This happens to me from time to time. My little muses evaporate with a change in my mood, and with them go the blog, the chatty emails I sometimes write to friends, and my best record of who I am at the moment. It’s an awkward feeling. What I write defines a large part of who I am. Without writing for a while, I begin feel like I am leaving no impression on the world, I’m just taking up space and waiting for something to happen.

Which isn’t really true of course. I know I have a bigger footprint than just these little Internet scribbles. But writing has become such an outlet and important process for coalescing the thoughts in my head that it has become essential to my daily life. It’s just like the person who runs daily, and pines when injured and unable to gain the happy endorphin feeling. That little bit of exercise (whether mental or physical) becomes the key to a well-balanced perspective on all other things.

When I stopped the Tour of America blog and started “Man In The Maze,” my friend Charlie accused me of being a blogging addict:

Your behavior is parallel to the withdrawal syndrome from opiates, ethyl alcohol, or nicotine. You can’t control the impulse.

You must first acknowledge that you have a problem; somewhere in the vast expanse of southern AZ is a blognot support group.

Looking back I can see (sarcastic comments aside) that writing has been my lifelong habit. Even in high school and college I had a fantastic IBM Selectric II that I loved to use to type out long letters. It had the most marvelous keyboard action, just tap a key, feel the “click” of the button, and watch the powered type ball leap up and smack the paper assertively. Typing on it was an industrial symphony: the electric motor hummed like an air conditioner and a faint smell of warm machine oil would waft out of the innards, and the ball would flick around whacking the paper with precision and unflappability.

You could never type fast enough to jam it, which was in itself enough reason to love the machine after using any manual typewriter, but the IBM was more than just a better mousetrap; it was one of those incredible machines that came out of the slide-rule era of engineering. Like the thrice-supersonic SR-71 (the fastest aircraft ever made, even today), it represented the pinnacle of what brilliant engineers could do with paper and brains, long before there were CAD stations on every desk. The Selectric II, and the kludgy ASR-33 TeleType that taught me how to type before that, were tactile and thunderous and they made me feel like I was doing something with every punch of a key.

Now, thirty years later, I type on nearly silent plastic keys, and the letters jump up in a virtual space. It lacks the apparent permanence of paper and ink, but the ideas presented here really have a shelf life considerably longer than the letters from my Selectric. Those letters are — for the most part — lost. At least here on the Internet there are a few people who will read the words, and the essays are retained by anonymous computers for me to reference someday in the future.

That is the gift of the Internet to frustrated writers everywhere. We must communicate or die of mental constipation. Here we can be guaranteed of publication, regardless of the opinions of obstructionist editors and publishers. Even though I am both (and hence can approve publication of my own screed) I take full advantage of the Internet as an alternative outlet.

And more than that — I take advantage of the Internet as a way to break the curse of Writer’s Block. See, when I began this essay I had absolutely nothing to talk about. For days I’ve been opening up the WordPress blog software and staring at the blank screen, then closing it again a few hours later. So I finally wrote just two words: “Writer’s Block” and let you, my friendly readers, be the inspiration. It’s a partnership we have, you & I. Thanks.

Apr 09 2011

Newbies

One of the things I enjoy is helping new owners learn about all the cool things you can do with an Airstream. It’s like being there when a kid first gets the hang of riding a bicycle and suddenly realizes how much bigger her world has become. It’s like watching someone taste gelato for the first time, when that wonderful explosion of flavor hits their brain and they see that there’s more to life than ice cream. You might think you know freedom, but when you hitch up that trailer and hit the road with destination unknown, you find an exhilaration that is unexplainable to those who haven’t tried it.

That’s a big part of the reason I wrote the Newbies Guide (copies of which were received at my office this week, and have been shipped to all the folks who pre-ordered them). Even though I can’t get the gratifying personal feedback of a face-to-face educational session, I’m still hoping the book will make it easier for people to get started.

Another joy of sharing knowledge about Airstreaming with newbies is the amusement factor of hearing their stories. Yes, I’m admitting it: I do laugh sometimes at the mistakes and stories people tell me. I’m just being honest here. Hey, I was a newbie once too, and I’ve had some pretty awful/humorous things happen to me, too. I can laugh about them … now ….

Once when camping in Oregon I ran into a couple who told me their water heater was broken. “The red light comes on, but the water isn’t hot,” they said. I explained that the red light was not an “ON” light, it was a “trouble” indicator, and the problem was that the heater wasn’t getting propane. “But we have propane!” they insisted. “We checked it last night.” So I explained to them how propane has a habit of getting used up during the night when the furnace is running. I also showed them how to switch over to the second propane tank, and then we reset the water heater by flipping the switch. Poof– the water heater lit.

The wife immediately ran the water. “See, it still isn’t hot — so the heater doesn’t work!” Very patiently (I think) I explained to them that the heater takes a bit of time to turn cold water into hot water.

Then I left them, with skeptical looks on their faces. I can’t blame them. After all, they had “proven” that everything I said was nonsense, and the final proof was that there was still no hot water. I’m sure they thought I was just a know-it-all until 30 minutes later when hot water finally began to flow.

Last week I helped get a newbie friend set up for his first-ever Airstreaming experience. He had several mishaps and points of confusion in his first few days, all of which were understandable, but my favorite was the gray tank problem. “Rich, I went to take a shower, and the water didn’t go down the drain,” he said with a distinct tone of confusion and suspicion. I could tell he was wondering just how small the RV gray tanks were, since his military-style shower probably required less than 2 gallons of water.

We went through the usual debugging questions (“Is the trailer level enough so that the water can reach the drain?” and “Did you dump the gray tank the day before?”) and there were no immediately obvious problems. I thought about it for a second, and then asked if he had left the gray dump valve open long enough to fully drain the tank.

“Uh … leave it open?” he replied. Hearing just that phrase, I knew we had found the problem. My dear friend, who I will leave safely anonymous out of my complete respect for him, had somehow gotten the impression that you dump the holding tanks by “pumping” the valve. I tried to stifle my snicker and then explained to him that the valve must be left open for a minute or two, until all of the waste water has rushed out.

[By the way, I’m going to do a seminar at Alumapalooza about being a newbie. It should be a lot of fun. I’m going to tell self-deprecating stories and try to encourage people ask the dumbest questions they can think of, just so we can all laugh and learn at the same time.]

As long as there are Airstreams there will be newbies, just as it is true that as long as there are colleges there will be freshmen. When you’re a “senior” you might easily begin to think that they are placed there for your amusement or condescension (and perhaps that’s partly true) but keep in mind that they are also a wonderful opportunity. Newbies are the people who allows us to pay back for the lessons our predecessors taught us. They remind us that nobody was born knowing everything, and they add value to the community by freshening it and broadening our perspective. I love ’em.

Apr 07 2011

The dream job

In the early years of Airstream Life magazine I was often asked by people how I was “so lucky” to get the job I have. To tell the truth, there wasn’t much luck involved. It was a matter of necessity meeting inspiration. I quit a perfectly good job in another industry because I was burned out, and stared out the window of my home office for a month trying to figure out what to do next.

No brilliant ideas came to mind, so I began working up a list of criteria for the next thing I wanted to do. It was December, and our 1968 Airstream Caravel was sitting out in driveway, waiting out the gray winter gloom until it could be de-winterized and used again. (See photo at right of three-year-old Emma and I shoveling the snow off our deck on a typical December afternoon. We were doing this so that I could fire up the outdoor grill. Such are the lengths that we would go, in order to break the monotony of winter.)

I thought back to the brilliant few weeks we had enjoyed with the Caravel in the summer, traveling all over the northeast states and Quebec, and I decided that the first requirement of my next job would be that I’d have the ability to keep using the Airstream frequently with my wife and toddler.

This seemed utterly unrealistic but brainstorming isn’t the time to be realistic. So I plowed on to the next criteria: I wanted a job where I would be my own boss again, where I could have the opportunity to write creatively, and which I could do from anywhere. Publishing felt like a good path to achieve all of this, but my publishing experience up to that point was strictly business-to-business newsletters of the deadly boring variety. If I were to re-enter that industry I wanted to publish something that I wanted to read. All of this led to the eventual concept of Airstream Life — a dream job where I could travel (nay, would be required to travel) via Airstream and have the freedom that comes with being my own boss.

But anyone who runs their own business knows it’s not as easy as that. Making a living, managing employees, and balancing work & life are just a few of the huge obstacles that confront any small business owner. It was a long time before Airstream Life was a financially viable business, and even today the unforeseen challenges and hassles continue to pop up on a regular basis. The dream was achieved in some ways, not in others, but overall I feel like we did OK.

One of the decisions I made early on was to have no employees. Everyone who works for Airstream Life is part-time contract, and they all have other jobs or clients (or are otherwise retired). I like this model because I can work with people who are truly self-motivated and need little management, and I can pick the very best people from nearly anywhere in the world and connect with them via the Internet.

The flip side is that it is sometimes difficult to replace those excellent people when they inevitably move on. This past week my assistant notified me that she was going to be leaving effective June 1, for personal reasons, and so my search for a replacement began. She was highly overqualified for the job, but that only meant that the job was done superbly, and so I’ve been talking to some more highly overqualified friends in hopes of finding a similar replacement.

One of them was interested in talking to me about the job, and we set up an appointment for last Sunday afternoon. Jokingly, she said, “I’m not dressing up for the interview,” to which I (also jokingly) replied, “No? At least wear some fishnet stockings — sexual harassment is part of the job, you know.”

“Good thing I have my law degree,” she shot back.

And that’s one of the many reasons I like hiring very experienced people. They aren’t afraid.

I’m also looking for some new contributing writers. One of the magazine’s most popular columns, “eBay Watch” has finally come to an end as the long-time author has decided to stop writing it. I’ve got a new concept for a buy/sell commentary column in mind, but haven’t yet found just the right person to write it. Anyone who is obsessive about scouring eBay, Craigslist, and other online sites for all types of Airstreams and Airstream-related items is invited to send me an introduction letter.

The last person I am seeking to replace is myself. Airstream Life has been the dream job that I wanted, but after seven years of running all aspects of the magazine, it feels like time for a change. I would like to gradually ease out of the Editor’s position and just act as Publisher from now on. Tom Bentley, a long-time contributor to the magazine, is stepping up to take over part of my job, as Associate Editor, and I certainly hope that he (and perhaps another Editor or two) will take on more responsibility in the future.

Replacing one’s self is probably the hardest hiring job ever, but also one of the most necessary for an entrepreneur. Once you’ve got things going well, you can stay in the captain’s chair forever or seek new challenges. But if you stay in place forever, you run the risk that the business will never transcend you. I want Airstream Life to continue after I’m gone (whether working on another project, retired, overseas, or dead, whichever comes first!) so I need to get serious about obsoleting myself.

Beside, I’m not one to sit still. With Alumapalooza and other projects taking up more of my time, I am happy to let someone else enjoy the Editor’s position under my guidance, and eventually with very little oversight. Don’t expect to see me disappear this year or even in 2012, but when I do eventually fade out, send me a note of congratulations because I’ll be happy I succeeded at my most challenging task.